


Control

by eluna



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Emotional Manipulation, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Manipulative Sam Winchester, POV Sam Winchester, Pre-Season/Series 01, Sam Winchester Leaves for Stanford, Sexual Manipulation, Stanford Era (Supernatural), Stanford Student Sam Winchester, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 05:46:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18462707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: The last thing Sam’s expecting is for Dean to yank him forward by the hair and kiss him, but that’s what happens next. He has a split second to register Dean’s firm, cracked lips and beer breath, his stomach roiling with the understanding that Sam was never meant to know this part of Dean, before Dean abruptly releases him and wrenches himself away, back toward the car, tossing Sam a muttered “sorry, fuck—sorry.”He watches Dean stumble on the walk back to the car, dimly aware that it’s Sam who’s in control of this moment, that it’s his choice whether to burn it down or to call Dean back, use the awful knowledge to keep—





	Control

Sam’s been living out of his duffel for the past month and a half, so it takes him no time at all to fling the contents of his life over his shoulder and storm out the front door. The bungalow they’ve been squatting in is halfway to crumbling completely; the door bounces right back out of the frame and falls open again behind him as Sam pounds across the porch and down the ramshackle steps, hell-bent on getting _away_ from Dad, from hunting, from—his pulse sings in his ears, perspiration beading up and dripping into his stinging eyes, distractingly enough that he flies about a foot into the air when a firm, sweaty hand claps him on the shoulder from behind.

Cursing himself for the gun that’s still tucked away in his duffel, Sam goes instead for the knife clasped onto his belt and uses his free hand to get a chokehold on—“Christ, Dean. Warn a guy next time, will you?”

Dean’s panting by the time Sam abruptly drops his hand from his brother’s neck, something akin to fear plastered across his stupid, guilty face. Sam blinks. He must have been walking for longer than he’d realized: he’s at least ten houses down the road from theirs, in front of another whose white paint has long since frayed into grey, probably equally abandoned. The weeds bloom halfway up his body when he marches into the vast expanse of what used to be farmland, once, but now is just—discarded. (He’s _not_ going to think about Dad, he’s _not_ —)

“Look at me, Sammy.” He bats away the fingers Dean brushes against his cheek; belatedly, he realizes he’s been crying, probably this whole time. As if Dean needs any more fodder to accuse Sam of being a drama queen or something. Hesitantly, Dean raises his hand again, and Sam notices this time that it’s shaking, and this time he lets Dean touch his face, his palm calloused and clammy where it skates across Sam’s cheek and into his scalp.

“Go back.” His voice sounds petty and weak. “Go be a good little soldier.”

Dean’s mouth twists. “I don’t think he even noticed when I took the car. Let me… uh, let me…”

He blinks again, and when he reopens his eyes, Sam’s gaze falls on the Impala parked a couple dozen feet behind them. It makes sense, of course, that Dean would take the car if he wanted to go looking for him, but Sam hadn’t even noticed the dull roar or the dim beam from the headlights when Dean was parking it there. “I don’t need a ride, if that’s what you’re offering. I’ll walk into town and hitch to the bus station. You were drinking earlier; you shouldn’t have taken the car at all—”

“I’m not offering. I don’t—there’s nothing else I can _give_ you, Sam, and you’re still…”

“ _You_ said you wouldn’t come with me. That’s on you. Fuck you, Dean, _fuck_ you for this—”

The last thing Sam’s expecting is for Dean to yank him forward by the hair and kiss him, but that’s what happens next. He has a split second to register Dean’s firm, cracked lips and beer breath, his stomach roiling with the understanding that Sam was never meant to _know_ this part of Dean, before Dean abruptly releases him and wrenches himself away, back toward the car, tossing Sam a muttered “sorry, fuck—sorry.”

He watches Dean stumble on the walk back to the car, dimly aware that it’s _Sam_ who’s in control of this moment, that it’s his choice whether to burn it down or to call Dean back, use the awful knowledge to keep—

“Dean!”

Jamming hands into the pockets of his jacket, Dean stops but doesn’t turn back around, won’t look at Sam even when he gets in front of his brother and seizes him by the shoulders. “Dean,” he says again, dumbly. He’s kind of regretting staying sober for the night, fleetingly envies Dean and Dad for how easily they can disengage with a bottle of whiskey, but it’s all right: Sam’s getting good as drunk on the power he’s lording over Dean, the potential for this punishment to inflict on Dean for never picking a side, let alone Sam’s.

“If you’re not coming back…” Dean clears his throat and stands there stricken, throat bobbing, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, but Sam can’t pity him. For an instant, he imagines it: stripping off their jeans and pounding Dean into the asphalt until he fucking bleeds, ensuring Dean will feel him for days after Sam’s gone, and _remember_ , and probably hate himself for it, too. He’s soft, but he could make it work, use his fist—

But as fractured as Sam’s feeling, he can’t bring himself to do it or even to want it. Instead, he slips a teasing hand into Dean’s front jean pocket and takes a little longer than he needs fishing out his keys. “I’ll take you back to the house. You shouldn’t be driving like this.”

“But—”

“Get in the damn car.”

Dean gets in the damn car. Sam almost loses his grip on himself again when the Impala roars to life ( _not_ for the last time, he _won’t_ think about it) under his hands, but he shakes his head a little to clear it, focuses on the way Dean’s thigh flinches when he drapes his right hand across it, and it’s a terribly long minute before he pulls the car into the weeds next to the house.

Dean doesn’t promise to call, and neither does Sam.

No: Dean breaks into Sam’s dormitory a month and a half into his first semester at Stanford.

He’s working a double shift at the dining hall when he gets three calls in a row from what turns out to be his roommate, Jed, whose squeaky voice sounds even more annoying over the phone when Sam finally ducks inside the freezer to answer. “Yeah, hey—so I just got back to the room, and there was a dude who I guess picked the lock and is drawing all these weird occult symbols all over the walls? Says his name is, uh—Lars Ulrich?”

Metallica. It figures. “Yeah, that’s—he’s harmless. You can just—can you tell him to go wait in the floor lounge until I get there? I’m closing tonight, so it’ll be a few hours before I can leave here.”

There’s a crackling sound and then muffled voices as Jed presumably covers up the speaker to talk to Dean. When the static clears, he asks Sam, sounding skeptical, “He wants to know where you work?”

Sam sighs.

He’s glad he has at least a few minutes for his heart to jump back down and out of his throat before he’s face-to-face with Dean again, but in the time it takes Dean to walk over, Sam’s anxiety just builds with his anticipation. He’s on dish duty today, but when he steps out for his break half an hour later, he lights on Dean as soon as he emerges from the back rooms and starts scanning the masses.

Easy as you please, Dean’s resting his hip against a post near the salad bar, chatting up some freshman-looking girl who’s looking dazedly up at him and his beat-up leather jacket and the gelled spikes of his hair like she’s never seen anything quite like him before, and maybe she hasn’t: it’s like almost everyone Sam’s met at Stanford is totally alien to the life of nomadic poverty that he and Dean endured their whole childhoods. Another hot surge of anger bubbles up from his gut, but Sam squashes it and struggles to get the tremors in his limbs under control as he crosses the room.

When their eyes meet, Dean’s mouth drops open mid-sentence and stays there; he literally brushes the girl to the side with the back of one hand as he pushes off from the post with his hips and fucking saunters up to meet Sam in the middle of the dining hall. “Hey,” says Sam scratchily, and even after a few violent coughs, he can’t get the lump out of his throat.

“Hi, kiddo,” Dean echoes, and Sam scowls.

He’s been drowning these past two months alone here, scraping by in his classes and barely managing to show up to most of his shifts in the dining hall, and just seeing Dean again with his moronic swagger and pretenses is enough to settle Sam’s bones, more than he’d like to admit, into a familiar lull of fond irritation. But that doesn’t matter: it’s Dean who showed up to California uninvited, Dean who cracked first, and that’s armor that Sam can use.

“Thought you got one of them all-expenses-paid scholarships to go here.”

“It’s a full tuition scholarship,” Sam says automatically. “I still need to pay my own housing, and I get free access to the food on breaks or after my shifts by working in campus dining.”

“No hairnet?”

“Don’t need one today—I’m on dishes.”

Scornfully, Dean plucks at Sam’s lime-green staff polo, pinching the fabric right against one of his pecs, and Sam can’t help but let out a tight shudder. “The charge for visitors to get in here is a complete rip, you know. They better have some damn good food in here.”

“It’s not _that_ good,” Sam warns him, but Dean seems to think otherwise ten minutes later when he’s scarfing down as much macaroni salad and steak as he can cram in his mouth. He looks thinner than the last time Sam saw him, with less bulk on his muscles, and Sam wonders for a second whether Dean’s stopped eating again before he catches himself and doesn’t allow that train of thought to continue.

As Dean hangs around and flirts with random passersby, Sam methodically works the industrial dishwasher for the remainder of his shift, half-surprised when he finally finds Dean patiently waiting at a table with a dessert plate full of pastries. The hysterical edge of abandonment that colors most of Sam’s waking hours had crept back up the more hours he spent at the sink and away from Dean, convincing himself his brother wouldn’t bother to stick around campus for him or, worse, that he’d somehow dreamt up Dean’s entire visit. Flashing Sam a frosting-lipped grin, however, Dean is perfectly real and present when Sam sidles up to him, mostly ignoring the scattered goodbyes from his coworkers that follow him out of the kitchen. “My dorm room is tiny, and I’ve got a roommate,” says Sam dumbly after they’ve been staring at each other for an awkward few seconds.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Dean laughs. If he’s nervous at all underneath the veneer, he’s doing a damn good job of hiding it. “I don’t think your roomie appreciated the sigils I started putting up. Not even a salt line, Sam? Seriously?”

“You can’t just paint the walls of my dorm room, Dean. That’s money from my deposit that now I’m not going to get back at the end of the year, to cover the damages.”

“So? You know how to hustle pool—”

“I don’t live like you do anymore! It’s expensive living in the real world—”

“Is that what this is? The ‘real world?’ Because this campus looks to me more like a vacation from the reality of what’s out there than anything.”

Sam feels sick, physically sick, with every word Dean’s saying, and he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment to collect himself. _Think_ , Winchester. Dean’s the one who came to visit— _Dean_ kissed _him_ —Sam can work with this. “Look,” he tells Dean as evenly as he can manage, “did you come here to see me or not? Because you can’t just help Dad cut me out of the family, dump a pile of _incest_ in my lap, and then show up here two months later expecting me to apologize when you start criticizing my choices.”

With a rush of satisfaction, he watches Dean’s face turn pale and eyes dart away from Sam’s. “That was a mist—don’t talk about it like that. I wouldn’t—hurt you; you gotta know that.”

But Sam doesn’t believe him: if Sam’s involuntary thoughts can flicker toward violence at the first hint of disrespect from his brother, so must Dean’s. It doesn’t matter if Sam never acts on it: the notion is still there, permeating the underbelly of his rage, dirtying him. “Eighteen years, Dean, and you never protected me. The least you can do is hold your damn tongue.”

Abashed, Dean scrubs at his eyes, then his chin; he’s sporting at least a couple days’ worth of stubble, blonde like his hair used to be when he was little. Not for the first time, Sam wonders how little _he_ was when Dean first started thinking of him… that way, and his stomach turns over with disgust at Dean, at himself, for what he’s _known_ these past two months that he’ll have to do if he ever, ever sees his brother again. If he wants to give Dean a reason not to leave him—

It’s a half-hour walk to where Dean’s parked the Impala, another fifteen minutes in the car before Dean pulls into the parking lot of the seemingly cheap-but-clean Budget Inn. The motel’s nightly rate is hardly what Sam would call a bargain, but then again, Sam grew up in the kind of backwoods towns where poverty slashes the price of everything around him—a far cry from the plush Bay Area.

“Dad let you take the car all the way to California by yourself?” Sam says, aiming to sound idle, as Dean jimmies the lock and lets them into the room. He’d be willing to bet that both beds are size full, not queen, and that the popcorn ceiling and orange shag have been around since at least the ’80s, but it’s at least tidy and mercifully odor-free.

“Naw, he gave it to me after—uh—about a month ago. He’s got his own truck now.” Dean shrugs, twisting his lips.

“Right,” says Sam. His mouth feels dry and his chest hot and prickly now that they’ve got relative privacy. He keeps reminding himself that he got out, he never has to go back to this life, one night in a motel with Dean won’t throw away everything he’s worked for and given up to _be_ at Stanford, in society. But, god, just standing here in the doorway makes Sam’s entire college career feel transient—never mind the years he spent studying and planning and arranging for aid. And now that Sam’s here…

For the last two months, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about that damn kiss. Sam turns it over in his mind again—the boozy taste, the dry catch of lips—he latches the door, steeling himself, and when he looks at Dean again, he feels dangerous.

It’s—horrible. When it’s over, they both lie awake but not talking, Dean’s naked shoulder brushing his, Sam’s eyes leaking steady tracks down his cheeks. He doesn’t brush them dry, doesn’t dare speak to Dean lest his voice waver and his façade crumble—

 _Sammy, I_ love  _you, please—_

“You didn’t have to do that,” Dean says now, shakily.

Yes, he _did_. Sam takes a few seconds to compose himself and steady his voice. “Go shower,” he says coolly. “You’re disgusting.”

Dean flinches, then a moment later rolls out of bed and pads off to the bathroom. Sam waits for him to switch on the water before he lets himself—

_I know I’m sick, okay, I know it, but I only ever wanted to take care of you—_

_Is this what you wanted? Is this what you need?_

_Yes._ Yes _._

 _You can’t ever leave. Do you hear me? You_ never leave  _me, Dean—_

He scrubs his face and follows Dean into the bathroom. Takes a second to watch Dean’s silhouette through the linen curtain. Sam’s always known objectively that his brother is beautiful, but it’s another thing to know it having slammed his naked body against Dean’s and watched him sob with pleasure and guilt.

He takes off his socks and squeezes into the shower, watching Dean flinch again and back himself up against the wall by the showerhead. Sam wonders how much of his relationship he’s going to have to burn off just to keep Dean coming back.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” he says. The cruel tilt is gone from his voice, but he still feels sickened, numb. “I give you what you want, and you give me what I want.”

“What is it that you want?” Dean asks quietly.

“You, here, whenever you can be.”

Water droplets cling to Dean’s skin and lashes, and he wipes his face clean of them for a moment before his forehead starts to mist up again. “Okay, Sammy,” he whispers, and Sam—

The thing is, it wasn’t _all_ bad. It was painful, it was repulsive, and yet there was a certain beauty to the way Dean looked at him, all broken-open and vulnerable, his breath hitching and eyes wide; there was a connectedness Sam felt as Dean pushed slow and slick into him, their lips catching, Dean promising to _take care of you, Sammy_ , and it was so wrong, and it was as close as Sam needs Dean to stay—


End file.
